Authorship – authority – authorisation – the author – the author’s will – the
author’s intention’: these form a cluster of notions whose validity for scholarly
editing I fundamentally question. Taking measure from a historical survey of
the discipline’s principles and practice from their institution under the dominance
of stemmatics up to their main present-day “author orientation” (Shillingsburg),
I see the need to split the terms ‘author’ and ‘authorship’ into a
pragmatic versus a conceptual aspect. What textual scholarship engages with,
directly and tangibly, is not authors but texts – and equally not works but texts –
materially inscribed in transmissions. In the materiality and artifice of texts,
‘authoriality’ is accessible conceptually only, in a manner analogous to the Foucauldian
‘author function’. Under such premises, as well, ‘authority’, ‘authorisation’
and ‘authorial intention’ become recognisable as exogenous to texts, not integral to them. Consequently, I propose to abandon ‘authority’, ‘authorisation’
and ‘authorial intention’ as overriding principles and arbiters in editorial
scholarship. Scholarly editing instead should re-situate itself in relation to texts,
to textual criticism, to literary criticism and to literary theory alike, and to do
so by re-focussing the methodology of its own practice. It should relinquish the
external props termed ‘authorised document’, ‘textual authority’, or ‘authorial
intention’ hitherto deferred to. Instead, it should revitalise skills fundamental
to inherited editorial scholarship, namely those of critically assessing, and
of editorially realising, textual validity. To re-embed editorial scholarship in
literary criticism and theory, moreover, the interpretative and hermeneutic
dimensions of textual criticism and scholarly editing will need to be freshly
mapped.
Keywords
Authorship; Author Function; Textual Criticism; Genetic Editing; Digital Editing;
Stemmatology